“Stepping
Into the Beautiful Project:
Uncertainty,
Grace, and Being Human”
Joan Sutherland, Roshi
Baccalaureate Address, Colorado College
May 16, 2004

Members of the administration, faculty, and College community, parents and
friends, and, especially, graduates:

These last two
years I’ve spent some time each spring here at Colorado
College, and it’s been a very enjoyable experience—I feel much
affection for the faculty and students I’ve met, and a real appreciation
for the college and what if offers. That makes it all the more an honor to
be invited to give this talk.

For a very very
long time, generation after generation of people have stepped into the beautiful
project, which is the exploration of what it means to be human. We ask, over
and over, What’s a human life for?

We have to keep
asking, because we come into this world without an instruction booklet (Enclosed,
one human life. Step A: Begin breathing…). Really,
that we ask the question seems an essential part of our nature—we are
a creature who wonders what it means to be alive.

What does it
mean to be alive in a universe that’s like a vast sea,
and everything we know and experience is no more than the sunlit foam on the
surface of the waves of that sea? And how is it that that sunlit foam—the
world as we experience it—is so terribly lovely and so awesomely difficult,
all at the same time?

These and more
are questions you’ll answer over time, with your own
life, as you discover what it means to be the particular human you are. And
as you explore what others have discovered, and those things that can be found
only in relationship to others. When you do the thing you didn’t think
you could, see something in a way no one ever quite has before, love beyond
what you could have imagined, you add to what it means to be human, for yourself
and for all of us.

Here’s the good news: The project you’re stepping into has been
underway a long time, and it will probably continue awhile longer. There are
a lot of people working on it. So you don’t have to do everything yourself,
which means you can concentrate on the things you’re meant to do. And
while you’re figuring that out, it also means that there will be many
others walking alongside you, to catch you when you slip, so you can try, and
make mistakes, and try again.

And the life
you live will not only be intimately connected with the lives of other people,
but also deeply embedded in the rest of this world. As the ecologist John
Seed said, “I try to remember that it’s not me trying
to protect the rainforest. Rather I am part of the rainforest protecting myself,
I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.”

It’s also true that this is a really complicated project. On the one
hand we see the magnificent things we as human beings have done—I’m
profoundly happy to be living in a time when I can see the images of the ultra
deep field sent back by the Hubble space telescope, and to walk down a street
in many American cities and hear all the different languages and accents, see
people from all over the world bustling and jostling and somehow on most days
more or less harmoniously making together a culture never before seen on this
planet.

And yet. This is a
complicated project. We’ve been doing it
a long time, and it’s not too hard to despair of our ever getting it
right. The evidence of our failures is all around us, right there at the breakfast
table when we pick up the newspaper and get our heart broken again.

But let’s assume for the moment that we care about this exhilarating,
heartbreaking, complicated project—that that’s why we’re
here, as students, as parents, as educators—because we care. We want
the project to continue, we want to see how it’s going to turn out, at
least in our lifetimes.

So now, dear
graduates, it’s time for me to add my voice to the chorus
Mary Oliver described in a poem which begins, “One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their
bad advice - ”

Here’s my bit of bad advice: To enter this project of discovering what
it means to be human, we have to be willing to hold the opposites, to get good
and comfortable with uncertainty and contradiction, to accept that we’ll
get much more intimate with the dreadful than we ever thought possible, and
that we’ll also receive more grace, from more unexpected places, than
we ever imagined. If you care about what it means to be human, you can’t
go to sleep to either the tremendous beauty or the tremendous pain of life.
You can’t pick one at the expense of the other—neither ‘don’t
worry, be happy’ nor ‘don’t be happy, worry’—because
then you’re not in anymore—not in all the way.

And so we need
a lot of what John Keats called negative capability, the capacity to “be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason”. To stay awhile with what we don’t yet know,
can’t figure out, wonder about, without immediately jumping to solve
it or explain it or fix it. To accept that we might never be able to solve
or explain or fix some things, but that doesn’t mean that we have to
turn away from them. To try to “learn to love the questions themselves,” as
the poet Rilke said, for “it is a question of experiencing everything.”

My chosen tradition
of Zen loves uncertainty: For meditation practice, the three virtues are
great faith, great perseverance, and great doubt. Here’s
a modern expression of this great doubt: When asked What is Zen?, the teacher
Suzuki Shunryu replied, “I can sum it up in two words: Not always so.”

To live with
an attitude of ‘not always so’ is a way of appreciating
that whatever we know, however we judge things, that knowledge and those judgments
are provisional; they’re subject to change, to refinement and improvement
and being completely overthrown, in the same way that everything in the known
universe is subject to change. And it’s to be interested in
the ways our ideas and opinions will change. “The agile mind is pleased
to find what it was not looking for”, as Lewis Hyde said.

To live with
an attitude of ‘not always so’ is, paradoxically,
a way of engaging with the way things actually are, as best we understand
that, and the way things inevitably change over time, rather than trying to
impose a vision of how we think the world ought to be. We humans are so good
at manufacturing these visions of the way things should be—be they political,
religious, economic, involving carbohydrates or exercise or the members of
our own family. The difficulty, of course, is that the world or the members
of our own families so seldom cooperate, so seldom bow their heads in wonder
at the magnificence of our vision—and so if we stick with the vision
at the expense of the actual world or our actual loved ones, we can find ourselves
in a chronic state of disappointment, and of complaint towards life for being
life. And the thing is that, as best we can tell, life is going to continue
being life for the foreseeable future.

On the other
hand, to entertain doubt, even about our own most cherished views, to love
the questions, to not irritably reach for solutions before we’ve
actually lived with the difficulty for awhile—that opens the way not
just to accept life on its own terms, but also to be unequivocally, happily, for life
in all its undomesticated thusness. It pulls us into life, into appreciating
life as a beautiful project, even when it’s difficult.

On the other
other hand, if there’s one thing human history makes clear,
it’s the consequences of personal beliefs and public institutions insisting
that their way is the one and only way. The Israeli Yehuda Amichai, who saw
some of those consequences up close, wrote this poem, called “The Place
Where We Are Right”:

From the place where we are rightflowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined
house once stood.

Doubts and loves. Wondering and caring. Curiosity and kindness. As a compact,
take-it-with-you-anywhere method for a happy life, you could do a lot worse.

Here’s one of the things about living like that: It means being aware
that, at any given moment, whatever I choose and you choose is bound in some
way to be a mistake. We don’t know how our choices are going to turn
out, we don’t know what would have happened if we’d chosen one
of the other alternatives up for consideration. Every choice, even the ones
that seem inevitable, involves some kind of loss or sacrifice, some kind of
risk. So then maybe the question becomes, In any situation, what’s the
most beautiful mistake you can make? What do you most care about, what seems
to have the most possibility, for yourself and for the world? There’s
something freeing in the humility of Yep, here goes another mistake, but I
think it’s a lovely one, and I’m really interested to see how it
turns out.

Sometimes the
mistake turns out pretty well, and there’s something to
learn from that. Sometimes it turns out not so well, and there’s something
to learn from that, too. In my tradition this is sometimes expressed as: You’re
perfect just as you are, and you could use a little improvement.

I began my bad
advice by saying that it’s helpful to be able to hold
apparent opposites. Another example is having a kind of dual perspective on
things: the short range, intimate view, and the long range, spacious view.
It’s a way of remembering that, wherever we are, we’re in a particular
landscape, a particular neighborhood, at a particular time—and also to
remember that if we lift our eyes to the horizon, the view is infinite, and
timeless. Both those things are true at the same time, and neither one of them
is complete without the other.

Perhaps they
are like the foreground and the background, both always present but one more
vivid than the other at a particular moment. You’ve spent
the morning packing for a hike in the wilderness, and the local landscape—what
gear to schlep, who’ll take care of the dog while you’re gone—is
very much in the foreground. Why you ever thought this trip was a good idea
recedes from view. Then you get out there and climb awhile, and you come over
the top of a rise and there’s range after range of mountains stretching
out before you. Background—the awesome vastness of the larger landscape—suddenly
becomes foreground, and the nagging details of daily life fall away.

Life is made
up of both kinds of moments, the intimate domestic ones and the grand, transpersonal
ones—and perhaps, with time, we come to see them
not as separate, but the intimate and the transpersonal as two aspects of every
moment. Here’s a poem about that, “What the Dog Perhaps Hears”,
by Lisel Mueller:

If an inaudible whistleblown between our lips
can send him home to us,then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathingand roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,headfirst, into the light
and the long brown soundof cracked cups, when it happens.We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry
up their wells, there isn’t a shudder
too high for us to hear.

What is it like up thereabove the shut-off level
of our simple ears?For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the worldchanged.

Even the simplest
moments of our individual lives, full of cracked cups and autumn leaves,
take place in the vast sea of life, with its inaudible roar. That roaring
vastness isn’t a place beyond or above or underneath where
we live everyday; it’s here all the time, is the moments of
the everyday.

The short view
pretty much takes care of itself through simple paying attention to what’s
happening around you—an easy thing to say and something
you can spend your whole life getting better at. Then what’s your
long view? Maybe it’s looking at the night sky, aware of the immensity
of things; or a spiritual belief in something greater than yourself;
or a humanist belief in the long arc of human progress. There’s
an old Chippewa song that says: “Sometimes I go about weeping,
and all the while I am being carried across the sky on a great wind.” That’s
remembering the long view. So another bit of bad advice: If you don’t
have a long view, get one; I promise you it’ll help.

Right now we
as a nation are getting a lot of really bad news. The short, intimate view
of this time is made up of the daily news and how we react to it, and so
there’s a lot of sorrow and anger and confusion in the neighborhood
at the moment. Here’s a thought about what a long view of this time might
be: We’re in a descent. We’re in one of those times that happen
to every person and every people, when what we’re doing isn’t
in some way working, and we and others are suffering because of it. If
we think of it like that, perhaps we also have a reason to hope: From
that perspective, this is a time when it would be almost impossible not to
re-examine our assumptions and our actions, to consider whether there
might not be better mistakes we could be making. We might notice what’s been skipped over—for
instance, a national conversation about what our role in the world should be—and
go back and pick those things up. This opportunity to look again is being
given to us at great cost, and I do hope that we as a people do not turn
away from it.

Because life
does give every indication of intending to go on being life, painful and
complicated things are going to go on happening. And if we hope to do what
we can to help with that, it’s all the more important to live
life not only fiercely, with a fierce caring for the world, but also sweetly,
with a sweet enjoyment of it as well.

Our lives are
made up of the work we do, yes—and they are also made
up of evenings spent cooking dinner with friends, and sitting up all night
with a sick child, and finally getting to visit the land of your ancestors.
Making gardens and hang gliding and three whole hours to do nothing but read
by the fire. And the things you didn’t expect, but make all the difference:
raising a child you didn’t give birth to, helping an elderly neighbor
as she’s dying, spending time in a foreign country because you fell in
love with someone who lives there.

I know you already
know this—I’m just reminding you, because if
you think it’s been hard to find time for the sweetness of life these
last few years, believe me, it’s only going to get harder. You have to
work at it, you have to protect it.

So take good care of each other. May you find refuge, again and again, in
the shelter of this world, and may you offer that shelter to others.

And when you’re caring fiercely about the world, remember that caring
opens our hearts, it makes us vulnerable. It can be a lonely thing to do on
your own. So care in groups. Finding people who care about the same things
you do is one of the places in our lives the sweetness and the fierceness come
together, and it’s more precious than rubies.

If, because of
your caring fiercely about the world, you find yourself in the position of
fighting for something, never forget what you’re fighting
for, because it can be so easy to get fixated on what you’re fighting
against. Right after September 11, 2001, the novelist Salman Rushdie wrote
a beautiful piece about this. He said, “We must agree on what matters:
kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion,
literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's
resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.” Your list
might be different, but oh, how I hope you have one.

When what you’re
fighting with is the same as what you’re
fighting for, that’s about as powerful as it gets. I remember
an interview with an Afrikaaner policeman, who spoke about the anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa. It was when the demonstrators started singing that
the police got really afraid, he said, because they knew that nobody who could
sing like that would lose.

In the earliest
days of my tradition, the source of all things was called the Dark Mysterious.
And from that original darkness stream branches of light, which become Ponderosa
pine and the cars on I-25 and all of us, gathered in this church. Each of
us is given a little bit of that light into our care. What will you make
of your bright shard? What shape will it take in your hands? In the particular
hands—fourteen billion years old, made from the original
stuff of the universe—that are yours? It is an old project, this one—bits
of light meeting and blending and fighting and bringing the world into existence,
over and over again. Life is no less than this. You will take your place, helping
to bring the world into existence each moment, each generation, and giving
it the particular shape it will have in your time, in your hands.

Congratulations on what you have accomplished, and many blessings for what
you are about to.